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If the medieval situation of Afghan women, along with other women under fundamentalist Islam, which rules by Sharia law, is tolerated then what is to stop it spreading to our shores? We sit in our air-conditioned homes, thinking we are free, yet turn a blind eye to what is happening right under our noses. We believe the hype that the mainstream media, controlled by the White House, spews about Afghan women being liberated due to U.S. intervention, yet the reality is, THERE HAS BEEN NO LIBERATION! All the puppets in the White House care about is creating an excuse for their masters’ war machine, women’s rights be damned. Well, take a good hard look through the RAWA website at http://www.RAWA.org and see if you come away with the same perceptions you had before you went there. Here’s a bit about the organization:

RAWA, the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan, was established in Kabul, Afghanistan, in 1977 as an independent political/social organization of Afghan women fighting for human rights and for social justice in Afghanistan.

This is not a distant organization calling the plays from a comfortable home in a western country. These women live in Afghanistan. They know what they are talking about. It is high time we listened and heeded their warning cry. This must not happen here. Think it can’t? If our puppet government can turn a blind eye to women’s suffering in other countries, what is to stop them from doing the same thing there if/when the time is ripe? Just how do you think the NWO scenario might play out?Think you are immune? Only the mega-rich masters calling the shots are. Keep this in mind as you read the following:

Islamic fundamentalism of any kind in essence looks upon women as sub-humans, fit only for household slavery and as a means of procreation. Such an outrageous view has incredibly been elevated to the status of official policy with the coming to power of the ignorant Taliban. Not only the Jehadis (Northern Alliance etc.) and Taliban but all Islamists (advocates of an Islamic political system) target women’s rights as a first priority, citing mediaeval Sharia (Islamic law) as their authority.

With the coming to power of Islamic fundamentalists in 1992, women’s right to full participation in social, economic, cultural and political life of the country was drastically curtailed and later on summarily denied them by the Taliban. Under the latter, women were totally deprived of the right to education (all girls’ school were closed down), of the right to work (all women were ordered to remain in their houses and employers were threatened with dire consequences for taking up female employees), of the right to travel (no woman could venture out of the house alone and unaccompanied by a prescribed male member of the woman’s immediate family), of the right to health (no woman could see a male doctor, family planning was outlawed, women could not be operated upon by a surgical team containing a male member), of the right to legal recourse (a woman’s testimony was worth half a man’s testimony; a woman could not petition the court directly – this had to be done through a prescribed male member of her immediate family), of the right to recreation (all women’s recreational and sporting facilities had been banned, women singers could not sing least their female voices ‘corrupt’ males, etc.), and of the right to being human (they could not show their faces in public to male strangers, they could not wear bright colored clothing, they could not wear make up, they could only appear outside their houses clad head to foot in shapeless bags called burqas, they could not wear shoes with heels that click [least the clicking sound of their feet corrupt males], they could not travel in private vehicles with male passengers, they did not have the right to raise their voices when talking in public, they could not laugh loud as it lures males into corruption, etc. etc.)

This incredible list could be carried on and on but does not in itself constitute the whole of the tragedy which has engulfed the better half of Afghan society. Women are looked upon as war booty, their bodies are another battleground for belligerent parties. Atrocities in Bosnia pale when compared to atrocities in Afghanistan, but unfortunately for reason which it may not be appropriate to go into in this context, the world community neither heard nor cared about what was going on in Afghanistan.

Beating up of women for ‘disciplinary’ reasons on the slightest pretext (wearing brightly colored shoes or thin stockings, having their bare ankles show when they walk, having their voices raised when they speak, having the sound of their laughter reach the ears of men strangers, having their heels click when walking etc.) was a routine phenomenon in Afghanistan under the Taliban. Through such public beatings (which more often than not have resulted in death or disablement of the victim) the Taliban had cowed the civilian population into submission.

With the fundamentalists’ war mentality, and fanned by ethnic hatred and religious bigotry, all areas that come under their control are regarded as occupied land and the inhabitants are treated accordingly. Sexual crimes against women, gang raping, lust murders, abductions of young females, blackmail of families with eligible daughters, etc. were commonplace during the rule of the pre-Taliban fundamentalists, who now once again have key positions in the government of Hamid Karzai and are free to brutalize Afghan women in areas under their domination.

In connection with custodial violence against women, documentation of sexual violence against women during times of conflict and violence against refugee and internally displaced women we would first and foremost like to refer you to Amnesty International’s reports such as WOMEN IN AFGHANISTAN: A human rights catastrophe (March 1995) or AFGHANISTAN: International responsibility for human rights disaster (November 1995), as an eloquent testimony to the situation of women under the fundamentalists. You may find many more such documents on the web site of Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch. Apart from the above, you can find a number of eyewitness accounts of atrocities by the Taliban and their Jehadi brothers on our web site.

After the 9/11 tragedy, when the US began bombing Afghanistan on October 7, 2001, the oppression of Afghan women was used as a justification for overthrowing the Taliban regime. Five weeks later America’s first lady, Laura Bush, stated triumphantly: “Because of our recent military gains in much of Afghanistan, women are no longer imprisoned in their homes. The fight against terrorism is also a fight for the rights and dignity of women.”